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  • Dewey: A Beginner's Guide
  • Raymond D. Boisvert (bio)
David Hildebrand, Dewey: A Beginner's Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008. 247 pp. ISBN 978-1-85168-580-6. $14.95 (pbk.)

John Dewey's early exposure to Hegel left a "permanent deposit" on his thinking. Dewey's Hegelian side does not emerge in the usual sense of someone predicting the march of Spirit through history. Rather it is as the complete philosopher seeking, above all else, to leave nothing out. Such a philosopher criticized reified abstractions, reinstated the centrality of relations, emphasized the importance of thinking ideas together with their history, and insisted on the interpenetration of individual and social. This Hegelian inheritance, when passed through the filter of praxis, identifies, for some interpreters (I plead guilty) the strength of Dewey's philosophy.

Coexisting with this dimension was another nineteenth-century strand, more consistent with theoria, the fascination with scientific method. This manifests itself as the attempt to articulate a philosophy which would match scientific achievements. For some pragmatists (once again, I plead guilty), moving forward means highlighting the Hegelian dimension and jettisoning the single methodology fascination. Most committed Deweyans, though, resist jettisoning anything. They seek, instead, a way to keep both dimensions smoothly interwoven. Such a seamless web approach is manifested in David Hildebrand's helpful book Dewey: A Beginner's Guide. The volume, from Oneworld Publications, makes up part of a series, Oneworld Beginner's Guides, joining other texts on the likes of Nietzsche, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Hume, and Rawls.

General introductions to Dewey are important. Readers of Education and Culture will realize that Dewey was an all-around philosopher. In the wider community, [End Page 94] where Dewey may be thought of exclusively as an educational reformer, it is necessary to provide reminders about how Dewey was, Hegel-like, a philosopher who sought to leave nothing out, someone as interested in art as he was in politics, education, and ethics. The strength of Hildebrand's volume derives from the way he provides a cogent, well-explained, easily readable introduction to the entire Deweyan corpus. In that way, his book joins others which have sought a similar overview, J. E. Tiles' Dewey, Jim Campbell's Understanding Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence, and my own John Dewey: Rethinking our Time.

Two major themes emerge, both of which recognize the Dewey-as-Hegelian dimension. The first is announced in the earliest pages. Dewey, says Hildebrand, offers us a twenty-first-century "philosophy of sustainability." This is not to be thought of as a philosophy of stasis. Rather, Dewey's orientation allows us to "adapt, survive, and grow" (x). By calling it a philosophy of sustainability Hildebrand effectively blocks the tendency to think of change for change's sake. Sustainability emphasizes the aufhebung dimension by which Hegel sought to move forward while preserving what was best from the past. So, for Dewey, a philosophy that embraces change and growth will be one rooted in experience (here is where we find the praxis at the root of pragmatism). It is not rooted in abstractions that remove us from our concrete lived situation.

Hildebrand emphasizes another Hegelian dimension, that of contextualism or pan-relationalism, by describing Dewey's philosophy as "ecological." In this way we recognize how "mind, body, and world are created by their mutual interaction" (21, 44, 150). Dewey then becomes the philosopher for those who accept that our situatedness in the world is marked by "ecological transactions that fund all types of experience" (150). Those transactions, in turn, culminate in the optimal combination of experiential wisdom and experimental approaches to change, that is, sustainability, in the best sense.

A philosopher does not arrive at sustainability and ecological transactions haphazardly. There are no more important choices for elucidation than identifying a thinker's point of departure. As one of my teachers, Etienne Gilson, was fond of saying, we can choose our starting points, but we cannot choose where those will lead us. One of Hildebrand's great strengths is how carefully he lays out two keys to understanding Dewey: a "practical starting point," and a "melioristic motive" (4-5). Philosophy does not begin with artificial cutouts of reality. Instead, it...

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